Anytime now there is going to be an announcement by Facebook, but what are they planning to launch? There are a plethora of rumours doing the rounds at the moment. What is known is that Facebook employees have been on “lockdown” for a couple of months so it is likely to be something major. Indeed there was even a clock in Facebook’s HQ that was counting down to today.

One of the major rumours is that Facebook is about to launch its own phone that runs an enhanced version of Facebook. Personally I think this is unlikely. I think this is simply people thinking “what have Google done recently?” and taking two and two and making twenty two. Having said that with the launch of Facebook Places then perhaps it would make sense to have a Facebook Phone that will allow users to check in at multiple venues.

There are also strong rumours of a revamp of the site. I think I can confirm that there will be some sort of announcement around new features. This afternoon on my web design page (www.facebook.com/blackburnwebdesign) there appeared a new tab called “wallpaper”, when I tried to access the tab my browser just crashed. So what would a wallpaper tab allow you to do? The obvious answer is to allow users to choose their own wallpaper. You can already do this on Twitter. I think that it is possible that they will announce a capability to personalise a lot of your page. Not just the background, but also the colour scheme to. The top menu bar may well be standard but below that I think you may be able to edit a lot of the presentational aspects of your profile. It may even include the choice of various templates to radically alter the layout of your page. Think what a WordPress theme is like and the way you can adjust where particular features like a calendar or tag cloud are displayed.

The downside to this would be that at the moment you know where everything is on a profile page if users can change the layout then it may lead to some confusion.

I think they may also announce enhanced integration between Facebook Places and existing Fan Pages. This would be a real advantage to a lot of companies to stop their Facebook presence becoming too fragmented.

I think that Facebook’s eventual aim is to control all of our access to the Internet, not through tiered access but by creating a silo. You log into Facebook when you switch your machine on and you stay in it all day. This would be an advertisers dream, knowing exactly where people will be and having the ability to profile users so that their advertising is targeted to specific users in specific locations.

I am sure we will all know very shortly, but if they do change the layout in anyway then there will undoubtedly be a backlash. Remember when they last changed the layout three years ago? It seemed like everybody and their dog was forming and joining groups to force Facebook to revert to their original design.